International Save the Children Alliance
Joe in Democratic Republic of Congo
by Rewrite the Future Communications Manager, Joe Hall
Life on the Edge
It used to take 8 hours to travel the winding, climbing 35 miles from Goma up through the mountains to Masisi. But recently South African troops from the UN peacekeeping force have been out with their diggers and steamrollers and now you can do it under three.
Good news if you're a farmer and want to trade (although some of the locals complain of higher food prices now people can get from Goma and back in a day to buy from here). Less good news is there are still a number of armed forces around Masisi and it can be dangerous just getting out to your fields... for more on the insecurity see below.
First stop for me was the Masisi health centre where we started up a programme a few months ago to care for babies and young children. Often really simple stuff like dealing with diarrhoea. Mind boggling to think that diarrhoea, which we all had when we were kids, can kill you here if you don't have the money for medicines (you have to pay for state healthcare in Congo).
About 17 children a month used to die here. Now we've got that down to none, or maybe one, a month. I can't put it more simply - 16 or 17 children stay alive each month because of our nurses and doctors, close to 200 children a year. I was impressed at how simple and powerful basic healthcare is.
Three things that struck me: one was how they used simple technology to do a lot. (Here, it's comparing a child's progress by taking pictures on a mobile phone - to accompany all the charts and monitoring they do.)
The second was the importance of partnerships. We had teamed up with French NGO Solidarités to clean up the river which was the water supply for lots of people, and which was spreading cholera. (What is cholera?) It was so obvious to me we need to team up more and more. In the long-term of course the government needs to be providing healthcare, that's our goal and that's where we need to get to.
The last was the importance of education. One of the things here is that mums are having lots of children one after another, and often they simply can't look after all of them well enough. Educating mums in other places has tended to mean they choose to have fewer children or space them out more, and education helps them know about basic health and nutrition which you can see is vital here. But one mum told me the reason she had lots of babies was "to rebuild my family - everyone has been killed in the war". What do you say to that?
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| Looking down from Masisi at dusk | Looking up in the early morning |
Masisi is incredibly beautiful, sitting at the top of a mountain pass.
It's also not very safe nearby. Below is a photo from Loasha health and nutrition centre, just 7 km away from Masisi. In those seven kilometres we passed through areas controlled by no fewer than four armed groups. I was talking to someone about the peace process and just how do you go about disarming all the different groups... they told me that even if you did, every household has a gun too that various politicians have come along and given them. If it's true, there's a long way to go here.
I struggled to reconcile this with this beautiful place I had seen, with wonderfully warm locals and inspiring Save the Children programmes. I was quickly brought down to earth the day after I left: on the same road up to Masisi, just 24 hours after I had travelled safely on it, a car carrying our staff was stopped by drugged, armed men. They were forced into a forest, stripped and robbed. In the days that followed, more NGOs were robbed by the same men on the same road - some beaten up too.
I was lucky. And I have a lot of respect for our staff who face these dangers on a regular basis. And it makes you realise how lucky we are living in safe countries. The people of Congo deserve the same peace and security.
In Loasha a Save the Children staff member measures the circumference round a child's arm - one of the classic measures of malnutrition